


The Wrong Words Keep Coming Out

by vulcansmirk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Episode: s08e21 The Great Escapist, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:44:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcansmirk/pseuds/vulcansmirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Sam find Cas in the middle of the road. They bring him back to the bunker. Set directly after "The Great Escapist."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wrong Words Keep Coming Out

When Dean laid his hand on Castiel, it was like every particle of his being breathed a sigh of relief. He sagged against Dean’s firm weight, beaten, bloody, and broken on the pavement. The Impala’s headlights burned bright in his peripheral vision, and he looked up into a near-dawn sky and thought, absurdly, of how clear it was, and how many stars winked down at him from the heavens. For the first time in weeks, he felt cool, clear air in his lungs.

“Cas?” came Dean’s panicked voice. “Cas, hey, man, can you hear me?”

 _Cas, you got your ears on?_  Castiel huffed a laugh. It turned into a cough, and he watched as blood flew from his mouth and spattered on Dean’s jacket.

“Oh, Jesus – ” Dean started moving then, struggling to lift his angel from the asphalt, barking orders to Sam, who rushed to follow them despite his own perilous condition. And Castiel felt like laughing again (though he refrained), because he couldn’t understand what Dean was saying, but he and Sam were both so harried, so  _worried,_  and there was no reason to be. There was no reason to worry about him.

 

Castiel wasn’t sure how, but somehow the Winchesters got him into the back of the Impala, and then he was leaning heavily on Sam’s shoulder and trying not to crumple into his lap as the engine screamed and Dean gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles. The trees whipped by so quickly, but the stars wheeled by at the same deliberate pace; Castiel couldn’t see them, of course, but he could feel them. He felt their little white pinprick smiles through the roof of the car, and it made him giggle again.

“Hey, Cas, you okay?” Sam murmured, placing a warm hand on his arm. Steadying him.

And he thought it was important,  _vitally_  important, at this moment, to address that – to address Sam’s supportive hand, which in this instant symbolized everything that Sam was, everything he’d been for Castiel over the years. Even when an angel of the Lord had lost faith in God, Sam never had, and even when he and Bobby had argued with Dean over whether their angel had betrayed them, Sam had only wanted to steer him right again. He had always believed in Castiel’s goodness, and he had always been a friend, and his voice, his whole  _presence_  was that steadying hand –

Cas struggled to lift his head up so he could look Sam in the eye. He met Sam’s hand with his own, and squeezed weakly.  _You are a light in the darkness,_  he wanted to say, but thought, at least, that this expressed some small sliver of gratitude.

Castiel receded, then, into that liminal space between sleep and waking, pulled back into awareness only briefly, and only just, when a strong set of hands hauled him out into the cool night. The familiar screech of the Impala’s closing doors was jarring for more reasons than one, but then Cas found the warmth of a shoulder – the scent of whiskey and leather – and he leaned into it and just  _breathed._  Even the unsteady motion of being half-dragged from the car couldn’t keep him in his own shoes; the last thing he really remembered was sadness, for the sun was coming up, and the first of the stars had begun to disappear into burnished bronze sky.

~*~

He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t. He more… drifted, sliding between shadows and bathing in amber light. It wasn’t peaceful. Bursts of violent red punctuated the lazy shifting of the void, like fireworks outshining the stars’ celestial smiles – and Castiel knew what fireworks were thanks to Dean; he’d seen them in Dean’s heaven, that sweet little Fourth of July with Sam that he’d tucked away where no one would see…

One particularly vibrant and booming firework yanked Castiel back into himself. His body was being jostled and jerked through a doorway (and since when had there been a doorway? He was still seeing stars) and there was a hand at his waist and one on his arm and one in his hair and one more with someone’s coat pressed to his bleeding abdomen, and his head stung as if from a recent blow, and there was a lot of cursing.

 _“Fuck,”_ Dean swore again, and, “Jesus Christ,” and Cas thought that last was a bit rude, but he let it slide, mostly because he couldn’t really speak. He tried, but it came out as kind of a whining groan, and that only had Dean cursing more, and Sam running a reassuring palm through his hair and whispering “Shhhh” in a way that made Castiel wonder what it would be like to have a father. Then the motion stopped, and the hands lowered him into a horizontal position, and he found himself sinking into the depths of some foamy cloud.

He rocked on the waves of heavy breathing for a moment, and then “Christ” lifted him up on a tiny, broken breath. Cas had lost track of the stars now, and the fireworks; all that was left was an aching, pulsing smoke.

“It’s alright, Sammy” brought him back down to the water, and “You should get some rest” reeled him in toward the shore. There were murmurs, footsteps –  _footsteps on the water,_ Cas thought giddily – and then, silence. Castiel let the waves lap over him in the shallows.

“Hey, Cas.”

_Cas, you got your ears on?_

“You there, buddy?”

_Where the hell are you, man?_

“Come on, Cas, I know you can hear me.”

_You heard me, didn’t you?_

“Cas.”

_I need you._

Castiel opened his eyes slowly, and –  _oh, there you are._  He’d found the stars again – green now, two points of glistening peridot above incomprehensible constellations of freckles. A tiny smile flitted across Dean’s lips, and Cas’s eyes shot down to catch it, transfixed. “Welcome back,” Dean said, and Cas could feel himself sinking into the inky depths of his voice.

And it clicked. The sharp sound of it clove through the honey-like chaos of Cas’s head, dug behind his eyes like urgency, hardened in his stomach like regret.  

“Dean.” He struggled to sit up, and Dean –  _same old beautiful Dean,_  a traitorous, prickling voice whispered – jumped to help him, catching his arm with a tenderness entirely unacquainted with the brusque, dispassionate movements of mere minutes before. And Cas took advantage of his proximity, curled the fingers of his left hand in a shirtsleeve, slid the palm of his right over a cheek strewn with celestial dust, just there, just like before.

“Dean,” he said again, nearly begged, and Dean looked wary, and a little afraid.

 “I… you.” He stopped. Blanched. Breathed, and, “You don’t deserve this.”

Castiel’s stomach sank, his hands suddenly cold. And Dean just looked confused, and Castiel could practically hear the doors swinging shut, the deadbolt clanking into place, and it wasn’t. It wasn’t right. That wasn’t what he wanted to say. His chest constricted.

“Yeah,” Dean laughed, quiet, a little forced, as he lifted Cas’s hands gingerly from his person. “Okay, Cas. Why don’t you rest some, huh? I’ll, uh… I’ll check up on you later.”

Castiel didn’t remember the sound of footsteps, or the whoosh of air as it entered the space Dean had filled. One moment there was Dean. The next, Castiel was alone.

~*~

Castiel spent an interminable age struggling against the boiling-honey complacency of his exhaustion, and then for some minutes he just languished in remorse. When he opened his eyes again – how many hours had it been? – he felt disjointed, and the feeling refused to fade. He didn’t recognize his surroundings; there was the bed where he lay, which felt like spun air beneath him, and a dresser across the room, and a stunning variety of weapons looking strangely domestic where they lined a nearby wall. From the bedside table, a small lamp filled the room with humming golden light.

Beneath that lamp, resting against its base, Castiel spied a photograph. He reached out, took it gingerly; in it, a woman with shining blonde hair smiled, not just with the curve of her lips or the gleam of her teeth, but with the warmth of her eyes. She was beautiful.

This place, it was… neat, and sparse, but it felt lived-in. It felt loved. And Castiel felt wrong here, the defective, wandering angel gleaning what small respite he could from a place that was so obviously home.

He set the picture down and maneuvered himself off the bed, careful not to jostle his wounded belly (wrapped in clean bandages, he noted, and already half-healed). It was a short walk to the door, and as he emerged from that cozy little room, a continuous happy clattering tripped its way into his awareness. Castiel followed the scrapes and sizzles to a set of stairs, and descended into a yawning chamber, adorned in the center with a massive elliptical table and constructed all in clean white stone. It was at this point that he noticed the smell: earthy, and velvety, with a little bit of a zing. He picked out the now-familiar scent of coffee.

Cas found Dean in the kitchen. He leaned over the stove stirring a thick carmine fluid; his back was turned. Green-struck white marble shone in the space between their feet.

Castiel was just wondering if he should announce his presence when Dean turned and caught his eye. He jumped.

“Dammit, Cas,” growled Dean. “How long have you been standing there?”

Cas shrugged. “Not long.” Deep breath. “That smells nice,” he said, gesturing toward the ruby-colored concoction.

Dean glanced backward. “Yeah, well, it’s – it’s raspberry. For the waffles, you know. Finally figured out how to work the waffle iron.” Fleetingly, he smiled.

Castiel offered no reply, just stood and stared, a thousand different words prickling, dissonant, inside his skull. Dean wiped a hand on his jeans, using the excuse to look down and break Castiel’s gaze.

“I… well, I wasn’t sure if you were sleeping, or what,” he went on, “but I thought, y’know, if you were, maybe you’d be hungry when you woke up. If you need sleep, you probably need food, too.” Then he fell silent.

And Cas just kept  _staring,_  and as he stared, his hands and his arms began to feel strangely empty, and his discordant thoughts coalesced into one cohesive entity. He took a few small steps toward Dean.

“You don’t deserve this,” Cas said, causing Dean’s brow to furrow a second time. It hadn’t been what he’d meant to say, before, but it was  _true_  – Dean didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve to be cleaning up Cas’s messes all the time. He didn’t deserve to have a guardian angel who was always broken, and he didn’t deserve the burden of fitting the shattered pieces back together again.

Dean huffed an uncertain laugh, trying to shrug it off. But Castiel maintained his gaze, and took three more steps in Dean’s direction, entering his space.

“You don’t deserve this,” he repeated, “and…” His hand came up, almost unbidden, and found once again the perfect curve of Dean’s jaw (the jaw he had rebuilt himself, woven of the rocks that were the bones of the river and molded of the wood that was the flesh of the trees, all of it with reverence, all of it with care). He looked fearlessly into the perfect green of Dean’s eyes (eyes he’d rebuilt himself, crafted with leaves and seas and precious gems melted down and mixed to attain that sunlight sparkle) and he said, “… I don’t deserve you.”

And Dean looked quietly stunned, pale lids and long lashes giving the depths of his green eyes a wide berth. Castiel smiled, a sad smile, an old smile. He leaned in close and brushed his lips with Dean’s, the touch barely a whisper. And then, in a voice almost too soft to sound, he said what he’d been meaning to say all along.

“But I need you.”

As Castiel pulled back a hair, the world held perfectly still. Blue searched carefully through green, searched for a reaction, searched for a sign.

The sign came not from Dean’s eyes, but from his fingers clenching around Cas’s hipbone. He pulled Cas close, pressing their lips together with force and with reverence. His other hand found Cas’s ribs, half-covered in bandages, and the sharp breath he inhaled betrayed an inexpressible relief. Dean’s eyes were closed, but his hands and his lips and his heaving chest said it all.

Soon enough, they would part, but only by inches. Cas would hang around the kitchen while Dean finished cooking, curious at his elbow all the time. Sam would join them (and it would be mid-afternoon, but Sam would look as though he’d only just rolled out of bed, his hair all mussed and his face still bearing the imprint of his pillow; Dean would tell Castiel afterward, when Sam had escaped to the library, that he was sleeping longer and longer, these days). Cas would insist on carrying the food to the table, but would spill a drop or two of Dean’s raspberry sauce on his hands; he would glance at Dean guiltily, but the other would only smile and wipe the red away with a gentle thumb.

The three of them would eat, Cas partaking though his vessel didn’t necessitate it. Sam would ask after Castiel’s injuries, and Castiel after Sam’s illness, and at moments solemnity would still the air in the room. Dean would ask, much, much later, why Cas had left, and where he had gone, and Cas would attempt to explain it as best he could, though he knew little about it himself.

Through it all would run a scarlet thread of contentment, maybe even renewal, and slowly, something in Cas would slot into place. His disjointed feeling would fade, and he wouldn’t even see it go. In some wordless place, tucked into the corner of his too-wide heart, Castiel would feel with unimpeachable certainty that he had found his way back home.


End file.
